


hot knife

by fealle



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Abusive Relationship, Alternate Universe - World War II, F/M, M/M, Post-World War II, Psychological Trauma, emotionally inept mutant husbands, hell lot of angst, long suffering wives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-04
Updated: 2013-01-04
Packaged: 2017-11-23 14:08:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/623029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fealle/pseuds/fealle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It wasn’t what Charles wanted but it was also something that he’s dreamt of for too long: Erik alive, Erik with him, and now that he’s here, he’s turned all of his nightmares into a prolonged encounter in which neither one of them could pull away long enough to forget either one, and still be alive. A dream within a dream within a dream.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hot knife

**i.**

He loves his wife a lot even though he doesn’t love her as much as she does, like how it's just another tragedy to add to the growing list of disappointments he’s made for himself. Sometimes Charles thinks that when she smiles at him it’s not out of happiness, or love, but a hidden feeling of deep pity that has exhausted her during their marriage, and the most she can muster to show him she cares about this tenuous arrangement they have was a slight pulling of the mouth into a smile. 

They have a good life after the war because Charles was a decorated man after Paris, 25th August, and though he walks now with a slight limp on his right foot he looks very much the epitome of his British stiff-upper lip upbringing; a good boy down to the very bones, except that this very picture of Charles Xavier was created using scraps of what he remembered of the boy that he was before he was deployed to war. 

Beyond the medals and the stiff cane he uses to hold himself upright Charles thinks, _I can’t remember a time when none of this mattered_ , when being in a room meant safety and security rather than what it is now in his mind: shelter, take cover, another bird’s nest to hide from a bigger one that is the world outside. After the war it had taken him a while to get used to his own skin, let alone the touch of someone else; he appreciates his wife who had been patient enough with his night terrors or moments of utter horror when he remembers the smell of the trenches and the smell of the dead and his voice loses its edge and lapses into German, _gott, in meiner Seele ein Sturm bleibe ruhe._

“Where did you learn your German, Charles?” his wife asks him, one day, and Charles laughs awkwardly, his voice sounding dead and hollow in his ears, and he replies to her, “just among the boys, back then, it was rather useful, and a terrifying language to yell at and disarm with.”

 _Just so_ , he tells himself when he wakes up in the middle of the night biting at his knuckles and trying not to scream when he dreams that he loses his legs from a land mine in one of the many dreams that had terrified him ever since he’d come back. _Ach, damals. Damals ich war ein Kind -_

 

**ii.**

Lehnsherr. That was the name he’d given him, when he’d uncovered his plots and found out who he was, he cornered him at an opera house in - Vichy, Vichy, he must remember Vichy, and Charles helplessly looks at the bottle he’s not drinking beside him because it’s eight in the morning and one must have manners, like the way people hold their breaths while passing the cemetery, one must have manners. Charles combs his hair perfectly to the side and shaves properly and conducts morning exercises for himself and dresses primly and cleanly and makes his bed properly at 6 in the morning, not a single energy wasted and all for purpose. Life in the military was a life of cleanliness, sometimes as clean as the barrel of a gun inserted down the throat.

Lehnsherr. He remembers Lehnsherr in Vichy, cornered him at the opera house, he had green eyes, he had a British uniform on but he’d stolen it from one of his men - a boy charles loved, now dead, and for that death Lehnsherr would pay - he dragged the German bastard from his perch and down came man and rifle and no albatross around his neck for Mccoy’s death, no hellfire following, just sheer cockiness and determination to live and Charles very much wanted to wipe that sneer off of his face.

Lehnsherr - he refused to think of him as anyone else ( _Erik_ , under the sheets in - in - )

“Temper, Charles. It doesn’t suit you.”

“You killed all of them,” he tells him almost hollowly, “you killed all of them and you missed my head on purpose. How dare you. How dare you. How dare -“

(If he repeats it, like a metronome, and times his accusations with the beatings of his heart, perhaps it will make them more potent than the growing coldness that he feels in his chest.)

Lehnsherr smiles, serene for a man who may or may not die that night. “One day, Charles,” he says rather cheerfully for a man with a barrel of a gun pointed at his head, “one day you will get the death you so badly crave from my own hands, or my death in your righteous own, but - “

\- his eyes flick to a belltower beyond Charles -

"- for now -"

\- and then suddenly Charles sees - 

 

**iii.**

\- he hits the ground, mouth tasting dirt and blood and sweat and Lehnsherr steps on his head with his heeled boot, kicks his mouth in, and shoots him near the spine, enough to cripple, though he’d wished he’d died all the same. It doesn’t matter anymore.

Even though it was a bullet, Lehnsherr reasons, it was much better than holding hands or kissing. At least, they touched; and that was the end of that affair. 

Schmidt, Lehnsherr remembers. He is a trophy waiting to be received, and there was the matter of Shaw, _Schmidt_ , there was the matter of Buchenwald that he has been distracted from (a price he has to pay for tasting humanity, love, my God, the price one has to pay for tasting it -) and he can’t speak to him about Charles. Erik is a trophy, he must be careful, must be good. From up above Azazel gestures to him, _go, move,_ and that was the only law that Lehnsherr knows to follow, really, and so he takes one final look at Charles’ body lying down on the steps of the opera-house, almost dead, maybe dying, and he leaves.

And Lehnsherr, of course, he remembers the colour of the sky and he remembers, once upon a time they showed _Medea_ here, back when the colour of the sky was blue and nothing like the grey it was inflicted with now; he’d always wanted to be part of a Greek tragedy where the worst is always yet to come and here he was. No glory in dying but there is a glory in returning because Schmidt expects him the way a son is expected to return to his father’s home. 

 

**iv.**

Charles died on that day. Or at least he thinks, a part of him died, scribbled pathetically on the steps for all the world to see where his spirit reels and pools bright red across marble.

 

**v.**

But it wasn’t always like that. There was a time when Lehnsherr wasn’t Lehnsherr but Erik, he’d come for charles because his mother was named Edie and Edie Lehnsherr was a good woman and she was one of the household help in the Xavier house, and she’d felt sorry for Charles; of course she knew a lot more about Charles than his parents ever will, because they never even saw Charles eye to eye without alcohol in their hands which Edie hands stonily to their soft, aristocratic palms and watches them drink to excess like lonely and starved children waiting for something they will never deserve. Love, perhaps, or maybe just truth, who knows.

Charles had stayed with Edie in the kitchens, Edie taught her bits of German and laughed at his mangled pronunciation until it became more than just interest to Carles, it became a hobby; a thing to be studied, like the way he hates his Latin but now he has reason to get better at learning languages. And then one day Edie tells him, _I have a son. He’s about your age. Would you like to see him?_

And that was when he met Erik, Erik who was taller than him and who had a faded black cap over his head and cold green eyes, who barely spoke english, at first, out of embarrassment at hearing his own accent. Erik taught him German, sometimes, in between scrubbing the floors and cleaning the grate of his fireplace. Charles taught him english, sometimes Latin because he couldn’t stand his professor and needed someone else to be with him, needed another victim so as not to be lonely in word and thought, and Erik fit the role beautifully; taught him a few lines from Ovid because he never understood the _Amores_ but he thought he learnt them well enough when he met Erik, the other boy. When Erik the other boy will come over with ice to heal his bruises from Cain and press his fingers with morbid fascination against his blue-green bruise and ask him, does he need to go to Cain’s, does he need anything else, does charles need him, does he need _him._

Blindly and foolishly, he had never realized he’d answered _yes_ while he taught him how to laugh and smile in english and another more quieter and private world in Latin as he learned, while Charles pretended to suffer beneath the supervision of his maestro. _Tua sum nova praeda, Cupido; porrigimus victas ad tua iura manus …_ Too young to know what love was when Charles asks him, “it hurts, kiss me here,” cheekily, one afternoon when he'd met Cain's fist as punishment for existing, another normal day in the house becoming swiftly bearable because there was _the other boy_. That was what being seven and foolish was like, Erik somberly agreeing as he leans towards him and presses his lips against the bruise. He used to joke a long time ago that he knew how to kiss because all his life he'd grown kissing _Torah_ and the open palms of saints. Boys could be saints, too, and boys could kiss like saints in that stone-cold, awfully restrained way when they needed to hold themselves with all their will, or otherwise come apart with the single touch, or single instance overcome with emotion. Lips formed into a kiss against an idol where useless prayers fell out of innocent mouths.

 

**vi.**

(Confession wasn’t any better after that, Erik knows, because whenever the priest asks him _child, what are your sins_ , the most that he could do is to open his hands. _Verdorben_. Don’t look in his eye. You don’t want to draw a connection between it and you.)

That was the long summer of his childhood where all of it melded into one infinitely long sunday afternoon where all he ever did was hold hands with Charles underneath the shade of large trees and then point up to a sky where planes and birds punctuated the blue from afar. And when Erik grew up and Charles grew up - for whatever definition of growing up there was left - the war came.

 

**vii.**

Of course the war spilled over from the edges of the map to an insanity that soaked the rest of the world in its bloody excesses and Charles had to leave for the front, Erik to the front as well, and the next time they met it was in a battle field where neither one of them were on the ground but still above all things, perched up in a bell tower or some other nest where they wait before they allow bullets to cross each other like stars or kisses, and it’s ridiculous, really, and it’s very sentimental and Charles could’ve cried the first time he realized _yes, yes it really is him_ , personal intelligence and surveillance and numerous contacts had confirmed it, _yes, he is the celebrated sniper on the german side._ He was not a religious man but he felt like praying every time he knelt and aimed. _Ave maria, Amen._

 

**viii.**

Moira is having a birthday celebration, her 34th, and Charles is genuinely happy for her to have made it this far with her. It's enough to get him a little misty-eyed but he doesn’t say it in such terms, he thinks it’s rather maudlin, tells her “I love you, dearest, and nothing in the world could ever change that,” wonders if he’s lying too much when he says three words too many in order to convince himself he was in the right. _Nil opus est bello—veniam pacemque rogamus; nec tibi laus armis victus inermis ero._ Like in all of those restless nights from the war where he'd scratch the wooden floors of his home and leave splinters underneath his fingernails because he couldn't hurt himself any more than Lehnsherr already did. That honour was taken from him. Every time he sleeps at Moira he whispers in her hair, _love me. Love me and perhaps I can learn to love myself._

He was a little older than his wife and he has been through a war that tore him apart in his mind, and the body that he carries is much like a burden or a curse sometimes, and he finds it still difficult to believe that he hasn’t learned anything at all. Love and war and death were all the same triad to him. Their guests were from the same company as Charles had been and they all tell the same jokes, and the ones that garner the most laughs are the jokes which always end with, "good lord, can you believe I came out of that alive." Charles smiles. It means all the same to him.

 

**ix.**

But like all haunted things that run away from the shadow that binds them, Charles is visited by a ghost.

 

**x.**

He becomes aware of someone watching him while excused himself to go to his study, pouring himself some scotch when he hears the breathing, and he has half a mind to take his handgun from his side (force of habit, unfortunate, but when you were a soldier who saw phantoms in the daylight as much as you did at nighttime, it was sometimes better than a rosary), when the ghost itself spoke: 

“ _Cedamus, leve fit, quod bene fertur, onus._ ”

Charles closes his eyes when he hears the words and when he opens them, he snarls, “you’ve no right to disturb the peace I’ve so carefully created in my own house.”

“Considering you’ve invaded mine as well, I beg to differ.” Lehnsherr - yes, he was not Erik anymore, Charles remembers that with such bitterness; Erik would never hurt him, never - 

but he has never been anyone else -

\- Erik Lehnsherr moved closer towards him, drank the scotch he’d been preparing for himself, and replied, “ _kein Liebling, keiner Kind_. All for peace, you say. Well, you’ve compromised a lot.”

“‘Compromised’, is that your word for it?” Charles asks him, and by god, he could rip him apart then and there, while he watches the smooth line of his neck and his adam’s apple bob up and down as he drinks. “No, Lehnsherr, I wouldn’t call it compromised. You left me on the steps in Vichy and when I woke up I thought I was in Hell. Do you know exactly what it feels like burning in and out of consciousness from morphine? I saw my brothers half-dead and dying in a hospital so full of corpses, all of us corpses, we might as well be a mausoleum, a madhouse, do you know how that feels, and you dare tell me it was a ‘compromise’?”

He flinches when he was called _Lehnsherr_ , like he’d been shot, but in that same, maddening calm voice, Erik replies, “it was a choice between them dying, or me having to put a bullet through your head. Believe me when I tell you - I don’t regret it.”

 

**xi.**

That Charles decides to punch him was not surprising. The only thing that made both of them deathly quiet was the threat of the guests outside having heard, and no, they weren’t; there was laughter and good cheer outside the room in which they were both going to steadily ruin themselves as the night dragged on.

That was the unfortunate part of it, wasn’t it, the fact that Erik knew that he wasn’t in love - but not out of love’s favours, either - and Erik knew of course how sad he was, knew as much as he did the difficulty of being in a position to be loved and being expected to reply back in the same fervour and honesty as the one who loves has already did. Charles wondered how he knew. How much he knew about his wife and what else does he know other than the fact that he couldn’t stand whatever physical contact beyond the way he’d been treated: as an invalid, as a soldier, but not something to be loved, and that was the extent of his wife’s intimacy with him. A long time ago he would’ve taken her to bed with cheesy lines and perhaps a line from a love poem or two, but that was a long time ago when he could introduce himself as Charles Xavier, without a rank or a file. Not who he was now.

He wanted to cry. It was unfair, that Erik would come and remind him of how much he hated things, how he tried so hard in that war to die because he couldn’t save the rest of the boys that had fallen from Erik’s gun and how he suffered so much because he knew Schmidt, he was surrounded by men like Schmidt; he knew the depth of Erik’s regard for the man, and even after the war Erik is very much like him now, every bit the man Charles hates him to have become; and yet, to him, still the boy that he spent his summers with, Latin rolling off their tongues like prayer while reciting the _Amores_ in the dark.

(There are a lot of things that Erik regrets, but to beg forgiveness is somehow worse than death, because a man has to accept the fact that he is worthy of someone's grace, and that is a difficult burden to bestow on someone who's just as lonely and broken as the man who would give him that grace, and what love he has left. It's a price he's not willing to pay but knows that among the living, there's only so few people who'd be willing to extend him that privilege before he dies.)

And so he did, he cried then and there, and Charles felt useless and pathetic that he’s a grown man and he’s been through a war and he has a good wife and now all of his pretense is going to disappear because he owes a debt or two to a man who he feels responsible for. Because he still thinks he could’ve done something else - could’ve done more - to offer the possibility of betrayal, perhaps defection, of Erik turning himself to his side, and they might forgive him if he tells them he was a Jew first, he did what he did because he was just following orders instead of telling them _Schmidt was my father, he was my only father, there was no-one else before Schmidt_. Charles thinks he could’ve done something more and Erik knows this which is why he puts a stop to it immediately by wiping Charles’ tears with his thumb and hissing, “don’t forget where you are.”

“Nevermind that, it’s already too late.” A pause, and he bites his lip, glances at him, searching his face for lies, more lies, finds none of the boy he’d fallen in love with as he murmurs, “are you staying for long?”

Erik shakes his head as he turns to light a cigarette. “No, not at all.” and then he adds; “I came because I heard you were alive and I wanted to see it for myself.”

“Well you have,” Charles replies. “would that I weren’t and you left me dead in Vichy where you spat out my heart.”

“You always get so poetic, whenever you get angry.” Erik - leans forward, curls his fingers into a fist, and Charles is tense, preparing for an assault - 

but he only kisses him, soft and chaste against his own, and replies, “I love you, I missed you, I don’t regret what I did, it’s good to see you.”

And that’s how he left Charles the first time he came to haunt him after the war, dazed and confused and seething in his own self-hatred and Erik’s destructive selfishness consuming him that it took all of his willpower to focus again on entertainment and the house party when a man that could’ve easily murdered him that night walked out of his door freely, like a friend, or something worse. Five-lettered word, neither his nor Erik's privilege to use it in each other's company because neither one knows exactly how to love without hurting the other more.

 

**xii.**

He would have trysts with him from then on, and Charles thinks that since it’s not as often as it could’ve been, it’s not as bad. He thinks that his wife is with someone else, too, an Irish man named Cassidy, but he doesn’t know, can’t verify, and he’s got no right to barge into her business when he’s conducting his own illicit affairs, biding his time in quiet, almost empty apartments that fill up with smoke and alcohol and regret.

They fuck the third time they meet again, Erik on the floor of his apartment watching Charles slick himself and get Erik hard, and then after the proper ministrations on his cock and in Charles he slides down on Erik’s cock, pushes it deep in his ass and lets himself get fucked by Erik, bouncing so obscenely on top of Erik as his own penis makes a mess on his abdomen while Charles goes up and down. Erik murmuring his name in between gasps and moans and cries and Charles moaning _oh, oh -_ until he comes, and he feels like - seven, fifteen, twenty again, all those times when Erik took his hand and pressed it against his lips and it was anything but innocent or good and yet they got away with it anyway. This was one of them, another of too many things that disappoint Charles and only add to Erik’s tendency to come up with ways to punish himself, self-flagellation with the help of Charles. 

It seems pointless to talk about what’s unfair anymore when nothing of who they are and what they were barely remained in the men that they were supposed to be, and so Charles quietly settles himself over Erik after they fuck, sweaty and warm and exhausted, much like dead lovers given how still they were that night. “Why did you come back, darling. And don’t give me anymore lies. Why did you come back, you know there’s nothing here for you, and it’s dangerous for you to be even out of your country.”

Britain was not going to pardon supporters of the Reich, and Schmidt and Erik were there, very high up, but he knew that Erik went missing for the longest time, there was a search for him internationally, and yet he was here, the most dangerous man in the world unclenching and opening at the command of Charles’ anger, ready to be pried open at his choosing.

But there’s nothing so serious about that when he hears Charles ask it, and he replies, “I don’t know. I wanted to see you, even though it was too risky.” and perhaps apologize, but it was one bloody war too late for that, and maybe he would’ve said something but it's too late. Or: the time to peacefully negotiate was now past, and they are trapped in a landmine full of mistakes that explode at command the more honest they become. “I have no reason that you’d like to hear. My reasons for keeping you close to me are more of a selfish nature than anything ideological.”

“You’ve come here to argue with me.”

“I’ve come here because I lo - “

”- _stop lying_ ,” charles growls at him, his fingers digging in his chest and threatening to break skin and make him bleed. “I’ve had enough of your lies and I want honesty, I want all the things that you’ve denied to me and you don’t get to tell me one answer from another because you feel that I prefer hearing this over that - it’s too much, Erik, this has to stop.”

“I’m Erik now, aren’t I.”

“You’ve always been Erik,” and charles, frustrated, drags his nails down his torso, and makes sure they draw blood as he does, thin welts that bleed underneath his fingernails. Erik doesn't flinch at all but he lets out a slow hiss of pain as he feels Charles hurt him, and he's smiling, he's slipping his hands inside his coat thrown carelessly aside to fish for a cigarette while Charles leant his head against his torso, desperately sad. “That’s the problem, I never gave up on you even though I knew I should, that was the problem. When I tried to put myself back after the war I remember who I was and who you were and that hurts, don’t you understand? Living half in the past and almost even the present, and I barely even have a future to speak of anymore, do you know how that feels?”

And Erik smiles, lighting his cigarette with a steady hand and exhaling smoke towards the ceiling, laughing hollowly in reply, and tells him, “of course I do. I damned us both for this very moment, after all.”

In love, but not out of the chance to fall out of love, and who says that Charles has a right to choose exactly how he would like to repair what he's chosen to destroy.

 

**xiii.**

Another party, and this time Erik arrives as part of the guests, having introduced himself as an estranged family of the late Brian Xavier, and it was all that Charles could do to lose his shit right then and there.

 _If Schmidt could see his son right now, he would’ve been proud,_ Charles tells himself bitterly, and once he’s closed the door he raises the cane and beats it across Erik’s face; it makes a resounding _thwack_ that is satisfying and which Charles also times as when the jazz band just begins to play with their deep drums and their shrill voices ascending to a powerful allegro. Erik’s mouth is bleeding and he wipes the blood away with the back of his hand, smiling. 

“I hate you,” Charles whispers, half-afraid that he will lose Erik tonight and half-excited that perhaps he finally will and be free of everything else. “I hate you, and I swear to god, I will do whatever I can in my power to make sure that you regret and understand what you’ve done wrong to me, to my brothers, to humanity as a whole when you took up Schmidt’s case for your own, and the whole Reich too, yes. All of those men and women distilled in you, and the worst part is, I haven’t stopped loving you ever since then.”

“Do tell the missus I’ve enjoyed the band she picked for tonight,” Erik still serene, still lovely as ever even when bloody as he kisses him, same as how he would fight him, rough and painful and dirty. It wasn’t what Charles wanted but it was also something that he’s dreamt of for too long, Erik alive, Erik with him, and now that he’s here, he’s turned all of his nightmares into a prolonged encounter in which neither one of them could pull away long enough to forget either one and still be alive. A dream within a dream within a dream.

 

**xiv.**

“I liked him,” his wife tells him one Sunday morning, outside the verandah with him while they take tea and have breakfast. “Mr. Eisenhardt. He’s exceedingly good-looking, and I feel sorry for him - he must be one of those sympathizers, you know? - who fled long before the whole continent on his side of the planet went to hell.”

Charles stirs the milk into his tea, and replies, “it was a misfortune that we all suffered, darling, unfortunately.”

_All that time we loved, we only measured it with the bodies dead on either side of the fence, and we’re the last two kings locked in a stalemate while our graveyards fill. Nothing else fills better than that._

His wife tells him, “you should kiss me, darling.” She is coquette and lovely and wonderful, and maybe he can even tell himself he forgives himself for what he couldn’t do as he kisses her; and of course, he realizes, as he pulls away and stares into her eyes and promises her love, _no. No I can’t._

**Author's Note:**

> German is all mine. I probably made a mistake or two in writing that, hurr sorry if I did.
> 
> Posted this first in dw, then in tumblr; this is an updated version.


End file.
